Who is Better Creating?
Notion template creator, Notion Ambassador and YouTuber. Known for Notion Life OS, a second brain template he built for his own life first, and for interviewing Notion CEO Ivan Zhao on camera.
This page recognises Better Creating for what they have contributed to the Notion community. It is written independently, it is not an endorsement, and it does not mean they use thePlus.so.
“I am deciding whether to buy Notion Life OS, or whether Better Creating is the person I should be learning Notion from.”
This page covers who Simon Pittman is, where his Notion work came from, what he has published for the Notion community for free, and what he is building now. It quotes his own pricing and his own user figures where he states them. It does not review Life OS, compare it against other second brain templates, or tell you whether it fits how you work.
Better Creating began in 2020. Simon Pittman calls it, on his own about page, "a pandemic side project, documenting my own productivity setup". His day job was theatre. He describes more than twenty years directing and choreographing in the UK, work that has taken in the RSC and the West End, and he is Creative Associate at the physical theatre company Frantic Assembly. He is represented as a director by Casarotto Ramsay & Associates and still puts up a few shows a year.
The turn came when the productivity setup stopped being a video subject and became a product. He packaged the workspace he was actually running into Notion Life OS, a second brain template built on GTD principles, and describes it on his site as "The exact system I use every day to organise my life & business". He became a Notion Ambassador, and there are now 21 templates under his name on the Notion Marketplace, from single-purpose habit and subscription trackers up to Life OS and the Complete Life OS Bundle.
That side project turned into what he calls a six-figure business. His about page puts the combined audience across his two YouTube channels at more than 280,000, with over 28 million lifetime views. In December 2024 he sat Notion founder and CEO Ivan Zhao down for a recorded interview and published it on the channel. His newer work has moved toward agents: Notion AI instructions, a Claude system, and a second channel built around them.
Directing actors turned out to be training for directing agents
Pittman came into tech, in his words, "sideways, with a background in the arts". He has never left it. Alongside Better Creating he still directs and does movement direction, with Next To Normal Immersive and The Great Christmas Feast among the current credits, and he holds the Creative Associate role at Frantic Assembly. He treats the theatre career as the qualification itself, arguing on his personal site that "20+ years as a theatre director is the ultimate training for the AI era", on the grounds that anyone who can brief and lead a room of collaborators already knows how to work with an agent. Whether or not you buy the analogy, it does explain the house style: his templates are staged. Life OS is organised into acts, Plan, Action, Capture and Track, and the copy on the product page reads like a director giving notes.
Life OS was the workspace he was already living in, published
The 2020 videos documented his own setup, and Notion Life OS is that setup with the personal data taken out. It pulls tasks, projects, goals, habits, ideas, finances and a knowledge base into one workspace, with every task carrying a project, a date and a priority, and Life Areas connecting the work to health, relationships and creative projects. He says on the page that it has been "Honed over years of development" and that more than 7,000 people are using it. He also split it by ability instead of leaving beginners to drown in it: Simplified Life OS at $99 strips the system back for people new to Notion, the full Life OS is $147, and the $219 Complete Bundle adds a client CRM, sales pipeline and the content system he runs Better Creating itself on. Across all his templates he claims over 20,000 users. His FAQ is unusually blunt about the platform underneath, confirming that everything works on a free Notion account and spelling out the one place it does not, the single-chart limit on the free plan.
He got the Notion CEO on camera and asked what Notion could learn from Lego
On 20 December 2024 he published "Is Notion CEO Ivan Zhao Designing The Future of Software? Full Interview!" on the Better Creating channel. It ran as part of Creating Things Done, his own interview series, described on the channel as interviews with productive people building amazing things. His blurb for the episode says they covered Notion's roadmap, the features then coming, Zhao's plans for 2025, and why Zhao thinks Notion has things to learn from Lego. Getting a founder to talk at length about product philosophy is a different job from making a template, and it left the Notion community with twenty-odd minutes of the founder answering questions in his own words. Alongside it he keeps a free Notion Second Brain Build Along, a step-by-step series that walks people through constructing a second brain while picking up the fundamentals, which is the same territory his paid Life OS occupies.
The templates now have agents living inside them
His recent work is about what Notion became once AI landed in it. Life OS now ships with an Agents & Skills Hub, where the pitch is that "Notion AI is only as good as the instructions you give it", so the template holds stored custom instructions, dedicated knowledge bases and specialist sub-agents. AgentOS, his multi-mode personal agent for Notion, sells at $89 and carries 88 ratings at a 4.95 average on the Notion Marketplace. He has extended the same idea past Notion with Claude CoWork OS at $149, and started a second YouTube channel, Systems Made Better, aimed at non-technical founders adopting AI systems. Behind all of it sits a four-stage framework he calls the Agentic Business Method, or CASA: Consolidate, Architect, Systematise, Activate. From September 2026 his flagship offer is a cohort programme, the Agentic Business Accelerator. On the MacStories podcast First, Last, Everything, asked for the last piece of technology that mattered to him, he answered Notion Agents.
Why Better Creating is on this list
He built one of the widely used second brain templates in Notion and then did the unglamorous work around it: a beginner tier for people who found the full system too much, a free build-along series for anyone who wanted to construct their own instead of buying his, and 21 templates on the Notion Marketplace ranging down to single trackers. He also put Ivan Zhao on camera for a long interview and published it free, which gave the Notion community a record of how the person running Notion thinks about the product.
We wrote this from public sources and we would rather get it right than get it first. If you are Better Creating and something here is wrong, missing, or you would prefer this page did not exist, tell us and we will fix or remove it.
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